Press

  • WTTW to air APTP’s delicious FEAST
    Hedy Weiss//Chicago Sun-Times

    Albany Park Theater Project is one of this city’s great treasures — a company of teenage actors that creates highly imaginative original productions produced on both its home stage in an Albany Park area field house, as well as on the stage of the Goodman Theatre, where its audience has expanded greatly in recent years.

  • APTP Receives MacArthur Award

    This morning, Albany Park Theater Project was named a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. All of us at APTP – the youth ensemble, alumni, staff, and board of directors – are honored and overjoyed to celebrate this monumental news with the friends, audience members, donors, and partners who have nurtured our creative community over the past 19 years.

  • Chicago Reader: Albany Park Theater Project Explores What We Talk about when We Talk about Food

    If you’re going to produce a theatrical production based on interviews with Chicagoans talking about food, Albany Park is as good a place to start as any. Not only is it one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city—and in the country—it’s also home to the Albany Park Theater Project, an ensemble of teenagers that has a history of producing shows that are honest, funny, and inspirational in the best possible way: after you see them, you want to do something.

  • “Ahead of the Curve”
    Morgan Greene, HowlRound

    “Ahead of the Curve”</br>Morgan Greene, HowlRound

    Albany Park Theater Project (APTP) has now produced over eighteen years of poetic, daring, justice-seeking work that has generated nineteen plays seen by 50,000 audience members, a yearly production slot at the Goodman Theatre, and an unrivaled reputation for the youth ensemble. APTP remains a theatre committed to authenticity, where the work is created from stories told by fellow community members—but they are always ahead of the curve. Before APTP, ensemble members Gustavo Duran, Kito Espino, Maria Velazquez, Chelsee Nava, and Kiara Lyn Manriquez thought theatre was “Shakespeare,” that it was “boring,” and that it wasn’t “for them.” But what they experienced at APTP was, as Manriquez described, “like nothing they had seen before.”